Fortran-lang no longer in Bing

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Hi @certik , I am not able to identify a reason for bing not crawling , I have checked with the lighthouse as well as we also added the cannonical links and also added redirects to the new webpage. I would be grateful and happy to patch if anyone could please help identify the underlying issue. ( the site is being very well indexed by Google , Ranking #1 in India when searched for “fortran language” , I am unable to identify the cause for the bing crawlers not crawling the website.)

I think Maybe we could also try this: IndexNow | Bing Webmaster Tools .

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43

@henilp105 which of these steps did we do, and which do we need to do?

I think we have not created a ticket at Microsoft, and maybe few other things we still didn’t do. Let’s get them done all. We are not the only ones with this problem, I found others, such as:

There are a lot more, I remember recently reading about some website, but can’t find it now. Well, probably using DuckDuckGo to search for why something isn’t included there doesn’t help, as they might be in a slight conflict of interest. :slight_smile:

Anyway, let’s do all of the above items, and if Microsoft doesn’t respond, let’s write a blog post with all the details what we did and timeline and let’s use our contacts in Microsoft and publicize on Twitter, Hacker News and other outlets to try to get this resolved. Any other ideas?

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44

Submitting a support request to the Bing Support team seems the way to go now:

https://www.bing.com/webmaster/support?ocid=fwsupport&source=helpdocvnext&type=triedeverything&action=submit

I can have a look into this, unless anyone else wants to take a lead.

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45

Why don’t we unpublish the old site? It’s one thing that seems quite relevant here and that we haven’t tried. If you have any objections, please write here, otherwise I’ll unpublish the site on Monday morning.

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46

FWIW here’s an estimate of search engine market shares:

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I think the key event was the website switch from the old to the new one. Google handled this correctly but Bing didn’t.

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@milancurcic go ahead and unpublish the old site. (I thought we already did that.)

After that, if this doesn’t get fixed in a week or so, let’s create the ticket, which @awvwgk can take a lead on.

Regarding the market share of search engines, I would be careful. I know that Google has pretty much 100% (the link above says over 93%), but I would not be surprised at all if it is like with Windows / Linux. Windows used to have close to 100%, but Linux was close to 100% on servers and HPC clusters, etc. So if something didn’t work on Linux, that was a real deal breaker, even if in a general statistics Linux was rounded to 0%. The statistics that we care about is developers and potential users of Fortran that maybe do not use Fortran yet.

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Cool, I just unpublished it.

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Thanks @milancurcic.

@henilp105 do you mind please watching this, and if it doesn’t get fixed in a week, to report back? Then will be a good time to create the ticket.

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Sure @certik.

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52

Just submitted a support request to the Bing Support team (ticket REQ00057435),

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Thanks @awvwgk ! I am guessing it would not fix itself anyway, so we might as well get started.

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I had already noticed something weird in Bing (fr). I don’t find fortran-lang.org in the first six pages. This is the top of the 6th page (everything normal here):

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But if I click to go to the 7th page, this is what I see:

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OK, I see Fortran-lang.org, but look:

  • the Bing logo is strange… a mix of several icons, even including Facebook…
  • the interface is in English, with only one tab entitled “ALL”.
  • In fact I see a first page for one second, then I am automatically redirected there.
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@vmagnin that is an improvement or regression of the state, say, from a week ago?

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No, I already noticed it last week. And even 13 days ago (see Fortran-lang no longer in Bing - #35 by vmagnin)

I don’t know what is that page with that buggy logo… Have you something similar in the English version?

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It behaves the same for me. When reaching page 7, the logo is the same mangled one you have shown. Page 7 is also the last page accessible.

Update: Doesn’t seem to be Fortran specific, the same behavior is observed if I search for “C++”, just that it happens on page 10.

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Interesting, if I do the same with C++, I can notice a difference in that final page: for C++ the interface is in French, for Fortran it is in English.

Very strange behavior… And does Microsoft is conscious that it uses the Facebook logo? :crazy_face:

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@vmagnin let me rephrase my question: do you see any improvement of searching “fortran” in Bing over the past half a year?

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@certik
For half a year, not really.

I don’t remember if I tried to go to that final Bing page then, or it did not exist six months ago, as I posted nothing about it.

The only certain improvement in Bing is that the old version of the site has disappeared (it was still present in April, see Fortran-lang no longer in Bing - #26 by vmagnin)

In the French Qwant, the situation is even a little worse. The 27th January, I posted “I can see on page 2 Learn — Fortran Programming Language” (the only page of the new site that was in the results). But it has now disappeared. In Qwant, the situation is just saved by a Wikipedia frame at the top right, which displays the URL of the new site.

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To be clear, in my post 13 days ago (Fortran-lang no longer in Bing - #35 by vmagnin), I was optimist with that final Bing page where our site appeared.

But today, looking at its strange behavior more attentively, I don’t know what to think. I hoped that our new site would go up like a bubble, but as this page is a kind of redirection, I fear it will not happen. The only positive thing is that it shows that Fortran-lang.org is still in Bing database. But if it is blacklisted in the normal results pages, what’s the use?

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